Very pale. Very interesting. Very very interesting.
Slowdive's debut was criticized upon release for not being as good as the three preceding singles, and all three are quite good indeed. But Just For a Day had and has its own strange, dislocated beauty. Rarely has something like 'rock' sounded less like a product of what it is -- technology bred in America combined with various musical strains. Everything here became pure, total, wonderful float. Blissout doesn't even really begin to describe it, actually, because it's something beyond that. And I still can't name quite what it is.
They were pounding, thrashing live, something often forgotten. They ripped into their songs even at the same pace they were played live, amps cranked, looking not at their shoes but at the audience. In studio, they combined that with just enough restraint to try for something else. Laugh about the idea of 'towering escarpments of feedback' or whatever rhetoric from 1991 amused you the most, but that was a spot on description, the way you weren't where you were when you listened. You weren't in your room or listening on headphones or whatever, you were in a narcotic, strange landscape where awesome, sun-streaked clouds in a glowing sunset billowed hugely on the horizon, mountains loomed with snow-capped peaks, waves crashed on seacoasts again and again (and considering one song was called "Waves," which cracks in with the gentlest and yet in context still one of the sharpest of guitar bits and then just goes on the chorus, why not?). Just the way Neil Halstead's guitar flowed at the end of "Celia's Dream" out of the reverb and digital delay, the perfect sparkling beauty throughout, and turned into its own miniature epic, soaring and scarring and burnt with a sepia tone, shimmering, echoing, roaring.
"Catch the Breeze" remains the most well-known track, being a single, and its own end is equally turbulent and majestic all at once -- the second chorus ends, a brief pause, then the rush. No orchestra ever got this spine-chillingly good, frankly, hearing all the shifts and shadings and melancholy energy -- it still causes me to tear up a little, and I have no problem in saying that, and you should have no problem in hearing it. The deepest of blue sighs comes up through me as I listen, and again, I'm so…taken.
Pulling apart every last great moment on this disc almost seems pointless after a time. Shall I refer to the way the piano rises out of depths on "Erik's (as in Satie) Song," or the sudden bright surge of the chorus in "Brighter"? I can, I have, I could continue. But throughout there's this suffused aura of love and passion, in its own way, a total wonderful glow -- there was much more kick to Slowdive than everyone realized, I feel, and I will hold to that to the end.
And when it comes to the end: hearing "Primal," the way everything gets louder and louder and more powerful, wash and feedback and delay and cello and vocals and again and again and again, a huge storm raining down from heaven ever more intensely, wonderfully, until suddenly it all cuts out…and a last final echoing away…and end.